External HD Boxes and Backup SW. What Works?

[Tomteriffic]

Hi folks, LTNS.

I just scared up a couple of WD 250 gig EIDE Hard drives. One's going in as an upgrade to my main machine (XP Pro). The WD tools have always worked just fine for copying the original drive, formatting partitioning, etc., so I'll likely go with that, unless somebody tells me otherwise.

My real question has to do with the second drive. I got it with the intention of putting it in an external box and using it for backups. The MGB horror story gave me cause to pause, and now I'm wondering what a good, reliable box might be and what decent backup software might be out there (besides Retrospect).

I too was under the impression that something like this would be pretty much Plug 'n Pray, but I guess not?

[Steve R Jones]

SyncBack is a flexible, and quite powerful backup and synchronization program that allows to to maintain backup copies of your files and folder, or to synchronize them, so that both locations always have a complete copy (e.g Laptop/PC). It offers different types of actions that let you choose how older and newer files are processed, which files should be excluded (by mask) and more. It offers standard file comparison based on the date and size, as well as optional MD5 checksum, which will detect even the slightest modifications to files. SyncBack also supports scheduled projects, FTPand zip compression of backups, as well as network login, simulation runs and more.

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/SyncBack/SyncBack.html